Carol Magee

Carol Magee specializes in African contemporary art with an emphasis on photography. Her current research examines African urban photography and sound art that investigates emotional, physical, psychological, or philosophical experiences of place. As a Co-PI for the Learning from Artists’ Archives project she is actively engaged with North Carolina artists, archivists, and students, helping facilitate the growth of communities that benefit from mutual learning and building on one another’s expertise. Her first book, Africa in the American Imagination: Popular Culture, Racialized Identities and African Visual Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2011) analyzed how popularly circulated objects significantly shape knowledge about Africa and the implications of that knowledge for Americans and Africans alike. Her interest in the structures of knowledge production also undergirds a collection of essays co-edited with Joanna Grabski (Dennison University). African art, Interviews, Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at Work (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) considers how interviews, interlocutors, and art historical narratives engage and entangle in the processes of scholarly production. She is a founding member of UNC’s Editorial Board as a partner in African Arts’ publishing consortium. After receiving her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, she held a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship at Elon University.

The interdisciplinary and cross-cultural nature of African visual culture frames her teaching and research. In both she emphasizes meanings at the site of production and local use as well as meanings at the sites of consumption (generated by the circulation of objects in non-local environments such as the international art market, tourist markets, museums, and various other contexts).